Monkey Say, FBI Agent Do
by icepixel
Summary: When objects with animal faces start telling Olivia Dunham to "bring him home," she goes to the one person who might have insight into what's going on: Jaye Tyler.


Olivia had just started typing the conclusion of her report on the incident with "Gus," as Walter called it, when she heard the voice.

"Bring him home," it said.

She looked up from her laptop. It was almost midnight; no one was in her apartment with her, and she knew from experience that her neighbors were either in bed or still out at this hour on a Friday night. She couldn't even hear any traffic outside her window.

"Bring him home," said the high, piping voice again.

It was coming from the chair in the corner of her bedroom. Odds and ends tended to collect there: a shirt she'd tossed over the back, a couple of books she'd been trying to make time to read, a stuffed monkey Ella had left the last time Olivia babysat. The weird thing was, rather than resting against the back of the chair, the toy almost seemed to be sitting up under its own power.

And its lips were moving.

"Bring him home!"

Olivia had always considered herself very mentally stable. Sure, the stuff she'd seen since she started working on Fringe cases had given her a few nightmares, and there were certainly times, in the early days, when she'd seriously wondered if she was seeing what she thought she was seeing before Walter stepped in with a rational, if _unusual_, explanation, but nothing had ever really given her reason to question her grip on reality. This was surely no different.

"Bring him home!"

She stood and strode across her bedroom to pick up the monkey. It gave a little squeak as she hoisted it by the arm. Methodically, she squeezed it from head to toe, feeling for a hidden speaker. She tried to ignore the way it giggled and, yes, _squirmed_ in her grip.

"That tickles!"

She took the monkey into the kitchen and opened her silverware drawer. She pulled out a large, very sharp knife.

"Bring him home!"

She sliced a long, jagged line down the monkey's back. Fluffy white polyester stuffing spilled out of the cut.

The monkey giggled again.

Poking two fingers into its body, she felt around for the speaker she knew had to be hidden there. But though she pulled out the stuffing and dug her fingers into the monkey's legs, arms, and head, she could feel only cloth, nothing electronic.

"Brin' 'im 'ome," the monkey repeated. She had her hand over its mouth, muffling the words.

She turned the monkey over and picked up the knife again, intending to cut the eyes off and see if something was attached to them. Before she could, the bottle of olive oil sitting next to the stove caught her attention.

"Bring him home," squawked the rooster in the logo.

Okay. Now things were officially getting weird, even for her.

The sound of something scraping across the counter caught her ear, and somewhat hesitantly, she slid her eyes toward the squeeze bottle of honey she'd used to sweeten her tea earlier that night. It was shaped like a bear, and that bear was now glaring at her.

"Bring him home," it said in a voice that reminded her of nothing so much as Goofy from those old Disney cartoons.

"What is going on?" Olivia finally said. Perhaps whoever had planted the speakers in her apartment—and she wasn't giving up on that idea, even though she hadn't found anything in the monkey—was waiting for a response.

"Bring him home," the bear insisted.

She thought back over the past several hours. Walter was on his usual cocktail of non-FDA-approved drugs, but he hadn't given her any without her express permission since she was a small child. And she hadn't touched or eaten anything unusual from the lab. Perhaps there was some kind of visual distortion device operating in addition to the speaker?

"Who are you? What do you want?" she asked.

"Bring him home!" the three animals chorused.

_Ask a stupid question..._ "Please, just tell me what's going on."

"Look her up," the bear said.

"Look who up?" Olivia was rapidly moving past caring about the fact that she was holding a conversation with a jar of honey. It said a lot about her life that this was the case.

"Look her up," the rooster squawked.

"You need to be more specific," she said.

"Look her up. Bring him home," the monkey urged.

"Fine! Just tell me _who_." But she had a feeling she already knew who "her" was. The more entertaining cases—those which weren't classified, anyway—tended to make their way around the Bureau grapevine, and she remembered hearing about one a few years ago where a woman in Niagara Falls had attempted to smuggle a Canadian woman across the border because, she claimed, a cow creamer and a stuffed bear had told her to.

"Look her up," the monkey repeated.

Leaving the monkey on the counter, Olivia returned to her laptop and signed in to the FBI database. Though the details she remembered were few, they were unique enough that the file she needed popped up in the first page of search results. Jaye Tyler: arrested for attempting to bring an illegal alien into the country in 2004, and suspected of but never tried for shoplifting stuffed animals, china figurines, key chains, and other items of little value from several stores in the Niagara area. According to her file, she still lived there, and was currently working in a restaurant called the Barrel.

Olivia sent the information to her phone and began to pack a bag.

* * *

><p>She arrived in Niagara Falls late the next afternoon. She had packed the monkey, olive oil, and honey, feeling more than a bit ridiculous as she encased them in evidence bags but doing it anyway before wrapping clothes around them and tucking the bundles into her duffel bag. She hadn't wanted to be distracted if they talked while she was driving.<p>

At gas stations and the sandwich shop where she'd stopped for lunch, she'd picked up a bag of pretzels with a cartoon of an elephant on it, a key chain in the shape of a dog, and a tiny glass blue bird. All of them had commanded her to "bring him home," though the blue bird had added, "He needs your help!"

"I'm trying!" she'd hissed at it, garnering a look from a customer who was browsing the convenience store shelf nearby. She really hoped the "he" wasn't Walter, who was 400 miles away in Boston. Just to be sure, she called Astrid and asked if she could check on him when she had a moment.

Once she reached Niagara Falls, her GPS led her to a well-kept brick building with a kitschy neon sign on the front. As far as she could tell, it was the right place. Maybe now she would get some answers.

She had spent the drive puzzling over what could possibly be making these things talk. When the dog had spoken to her in a gas station store near Albany, she'd finally let go of the idea that someone had been in her apartment to plant speakers, as well as the theory that she had been drugged. Could they have spontaneously developed the ability to speak? She had, after all, just seen a fungus that had evolved the ability to forge an emotional connection with a ten-year-old boy. Although the fungus was at least alive to start with.

There was another possibility, of course. But that didn't bear thinking about. Not until she had to, anyway.

A bell on the Barrel's door rang as Olivia pushed it open. At four o'clock, the bar was quiet; the happy hour drinkers hadn't yet started to trickle in, and the dinner crowd was hours away from showing up. Olivia scanned the cavernous room, finally lighting on the woman she'd come to see. She was behind the bar, laughing at something a dark-haired man about her age was saying.

Olivia approached them, her ID already displayed. "Jaye Tyler?" she asked.

The pair's eyes widened. Jaye darted a glance to her left, and Olivia immediately surmised both that the back door was that way, and that Jaye was the kind of person who'd had need of it in the past. "Who wants to know?" Jaye finally asked.

"My name is Olivia Dunham. I work for the FBI." She put her ID back in her coat pocket. "I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Is this about the fire at the library? Because that was totally not my fault."

"Fire at the library?" Olivia repeated.

"Never mind," Jaye said quickly.

"Could we see your badge?" the man standing next to Jaye asked.

She took out her badge out and it up for the pair to see, but added, "I'm actually not here on official business. But Miss Tyler, you might be able to give me some information that could help solve a case I'm working on." Inanimate objects talking to her surely qualified as a Fringe case, even if she hadn't exactly logged it with Broyles.

The large green fish mounted above the bar suddenly twisted its neck to look at her. "He needs your help. Bring him home."

Jaye, she noticed, had also turned to look at the fish. The woman's expression hovered somewhere between confused and annoyed. "Fine," she muttered, and turned back to Olivia. "I'll tell you everything I know."

"Jaye?" the man said. "Did the fish..."

"Ix-nay on the arp-cay!" Jaye hissed at him. Olivia mentally filed the exchange away for later.

Jaye plastered a fake smile on her face and said to Olivia, "Let's go in the back." Without waiting for Olivia to respond, she marched toward the Employees Only door at the back of the bar. Olivia nodded at the man behind the bar and followed.

* * *

><p>"Have you worked here long?" Olivia asked as Jaye led her to a dim storage room and indicated she should take a seat with her on the giant burlap bags of beans and rice laying against the walls. Olivia noticed a box of cocktail cherries with a rabbit in its logo on one of the shelves, and sat so that she faced away from it. No need to tempt these creatures, whatever they were.<p>

"Only about a year. The old owner died suddenly, and since he didn't have any family he left the bar to Eric, the guy you met out there. He offered to let me work part-time in management as long as I promised to never talk to the customers." She began fiddling with one of the pull-strings on her hoodie. "Most of my income actually comes from writing. You'd be surprised how many people will read a webcomic about the homoerotic adventures of a wax lion and a brass monkey."

Olivia didn't quite know how to respond to that. Luckily, she didn't have to. Jaye continued, "You're here about the talking animals, aren't you?"

"How did you know?" Could she have noticed that Olivia heard the fish talk as well?

"I've watched enough _X-Files_ to know you guys deal with the weird stuff."

Olivia smiled tightly. The _X-Files_ references had gotten old at Quantico, and had only gotten worse during her time working Fringe cases. "Well, I don't exactly investigate aliens, but this case is...rather unusual." She leaned forward. "Your file says that you tried to smuggle a Canadian woman with an expired visa across the border because...a cow creamer told you to."

"Dammit! Did Aaron really tell you guys that? I'll kill him!" Jaye's hands curled into fists.

Olivia raised her eyebrows.

Jaye edged away from her ever so slightly. "I'm not crazy. I actually have a certificate from one of the best psychiatrists in the state to that effect."

"I'm not interested in labeling you. I just need to know more about how these objects talk to you, and what they say."

Jaye gave her a calculating look. "What exactly is this case about?"

She paused, considering how much to tell the woman. She wasn't thrilled by the thought of admitting that she heard inanimate objects talking to her, but if it would get Jaye to tell her the details, then maybe she should be honest.

"It's actually me," she said. "They've been talking to me."

She wasn't sure how she'd expected Jaye to react, but jerking to attention and staring at her like she'd just found a new best friend wasn't quite it. "You hear them too? Oh, thank God!" On the other hand, telling Jaye what she was experiencing did seem to have been the right course of action. The other woman was practically vibrating with joy.

"Well, I hear something," Olivia said, trying to not to get either of their hopes up. She might be experiencing an entirely different phenomenon, she reminded herself. "So far it's only been things with animal faces. They've been giving me vague commands that I don't know how to follow."

"Are they very non-specific with their pronouns?"

"Yes," said Olivia, surprised. "They keep telling me to 'bring him home,' and that 'he needs my help,' but I don't have any idea who 'he' is. I found you because they kept telling me to 'look her up,' but it was only sheer luck that I remembered hearing about your case."

"That's what they do." Jaye shook her head, looking resigned. "They never tell you exactly what they want. You're just supposed to figure it out, and hope you don't break any laws along the way." She paused, suddenly tense. "Not that I've broken any laws. Lately, anyway."

Olivia unsuccessfully tried to tamp down the smile that came to her lips. "I'll keep that in mind."

Her mood turned serious again as she asked her next question. "How do you make them stop?"

"Oh, God, I wish I knew," Jaye moaned. "The only way seems to be to just do what they say. Eventually if you humiliate yourself enough, it seems to satisfy them." Her shoulders slumped. "But—and this might matter more to you than me, seeing as you went into law enforcement—you do at least usually wind up helping someone. It's just not always the person you thought it was going to be."

"I see." Olivia chewed this over for a moment. "Is there anything else you can tell me about them?"

"You should really talk to my brother about that; he wrote about them for his doctorate in comparative religion. He's backpacking in India for the next month, though." She shrugged. "He thinks God speaks through them. Or the Devil. He's never really decided."

That was troubling. "And what do you think?"

Jaye looked at her, and Olivia was suddenly aware of just how much longer Jaye had been dealing with this than she had. "I think he needs your help. You should bring him home."

* * *

><p>In a cheap motel room that night, Olivia lined her collection of animal-faced objects on the end of the bed. She stared at them for several minutes, unsure what to do. Did whatever this was allow her to initiate conversations?<p>

Finally, she decided to just begin. She took a breath and tried not to feel ridiculous—or worse, insane—for talking to a row of inanimate objects. "Hello?"

Silence.

"Look, I don't understand what you want."

The destuffed monkey, strands of filling still trailing out of its back, turned its head to stare at her. "Bring him home."

"He needs your help," the dog on the key chain growled.

"You have to be more specific," Olivia pleaded. "_Who_ needs my help? Who do I need to bring home?"

"The man you've never met," the elephant said. It raised its trunk over its head and trumpeted.

She reminded herself that shooting each of these objects in the face was not an acceptable way to deal with the situation. "There are billions of men I've never met."

The bear blinked at her. "He needs your help."

"_Who needs my help?_" she all but screamed.

The person in the next room pounded on the wall. She slumped against the headboard, hot tears of frustration filling her eyes. Was this how Walter had felt in St. Claire's?

The blue bird flapped its glass wings. "You used to know him," it tweeted.

She had to laugh at that, a deeply bitter chuckle. "I've never met him, but I used to know him. Great. I'm sure that will go over wonderfully on an APB."

The clock on the bedside table silently counted the minutes as she tried to figure out what it might mean. The two pieces of description she had could not be reconciled, at least not in any way she could imagine. Could they mean that she'd never met the man, but her alternate self had once known him? Did these animals know about the other universe?

_Why not? It's no crazier than anything else._

She focused on the animals again. "If you won't tell me any more about the man, will you at least tell me why you're talking to me?"

More time, she wasn't sure how much, passed, and she almost gave up hope of any response at all, even a repetition of the demands they'd been making of her all day. But then the bear cocked its head. "You wouldn't listen any other way."

Well. That was just great.

Eventually, exhausted by the long drive and lulled by the overactive heater in the room, she fell asleep. Like she'd been doing every night for the past three weeks, she dreamed of the nameless man she'd drawn and run through facial recognition. As usual, he was barely visible, standing in a dark fog that swirled around him, obscuring and then revealing his face. No matter how fast she ran, she never seemed to get any closer to him. But tonight, instead of silently staring at her with wide, imploring eyes like the other nights, he spoke. Yelled, really.

"Olivia! Olivia, I'm right here! I want to come home! Olivia!"

Gasping for breath, she shot awake, nearly knocking the animals off the bed as she kicked for purchase. "It's him!" she exclaimed, looking at their mute faces. "It's him, isn't it? The man from my dream?"

They didn't say anything, but she didn't need them to. She was sure of it. Whoever he was, this was the man she had to help, the man she had to bring home.

* * *

><p>She drove straight to the lab, not even bothering to drop her bag off at home. "Walter," she called as she entered. "Walter, I need to talk to you right now."<p>

No response. She walked through the lab, glancing over the sheeted surfaces, heading for his office at the back. "Walter?" she said, peering through the door.

Despite what he'd done to her as a child, she always felt a little sad when she saw what the years in St. Claire's had done to the man. The sorrow pierced even more sharply when she saw that he was sitting in his swivel chair, eyes closed, his hands over his ears, humming a Doors song at top volume. She gently touched his shoulder. "Walter."

"Hmm?" He opened his eyes, smiling when he saw her. "Olivia, I didn't hear you come in."

"I'm not surprised." She raised an eyebrow and waited for him to get the hint. After a moment, he hesitantly removed his hands from his ears, his arms trembling as he brought them down to his sides. "Walter, is something wrong?"

"Wrong?" His eyes darted, appearing to look everywhere except at her. "Of course not, my dear."

She knew he was lying, but she wasn't sure they had time to pursue it right now. As she'd driven into the city, the animals, muffled as they were in her bag, had still managed to make themselves heard, crying, "He needs your help!" and "Bring him home!" in voices that sounded ever more frantic.

"Well, Walter, I need your help." She knelt and pulled out her sketch of the man from her dream. She unfolded it for him to see as she spoke. "I know this is going to sound crazy, but I keep dreaming about this man. I think—"

"Him!" Walter cried. He pointed a shaking finger at her drawing, while the other hand covered his mouth. He looked near tears.

"Walter?"

"That man. That man, I've been seeing him—I thought they were hallucinations, but if you—"

"Walter, slow down. Are you saying you've seen this man before?"

"Yes, yes, he's the man in the mirror. I've been seeing him in mirrors and monitors and steel pans for weeks now, that's why I covered them up..."

Walter was about five seconds from breaking down completely. She wanted nothing more than to sit with him until he'd gotten it out of his system, but now she was surer than ever that they had to find this man as soon as possible.

"Walter, I need you to—"

"He's been talking to me too; I hear his voice in my head but nobody else can hear him..."

"He talks to you?" Suddenly things fell into place. "Walter, it's all right. I think he's been talking to me, too."

Walter scrubbed his hands over his face and gave her a look of such hope that she could practically feel her heart cracking. "You've heard him?"

"Well, maybe not him, exactly, but I think he's been trying to communicate with me. He's sent...emissaries."

"Emissaries?"

She explained the talking animals. After hearing that the man in her dreams had been appearing to Walter as well, she didn't feel as absurd speaking of them as she would have just a few minutes earlier.

"We have to find him," she said. "I don't think we have much time."

Walter nodded eagerly. "I have an idea."

* * *

><p>Two hours later, when she was seated in a dentist's chair and hooked up to electrodes, with an IV pumping Walter's homemade psychotropic drugs into her arm, she was somewhat less excited about the current plan. "Are you sure about this?" Astrid whispered as she adjusted the IV. Lincoln stood a few feet away, taking in everything with a stunned expression.<p>

"Walter thinks it's the only way."

"You know you can say no to these schemes of his."

She couldn't, really. Not this time. Finding out who this man was was too important to her, and to Walter. "I know," she said.

Walter clapped his hands, commanding their attention. "All right! Olivia, are you ready?"

As she ever would be, she supposed. She nodded.

"Good, good. Now, I believe the man we're looking for is slightly out of phase with our reality. He is trapped, essentially, somewhere between our universe and another, not necessarily the one we know. This is why I've been seeing him only in flashes, and why you've only been able to sense him in your dreams.

"Olivia, the drugs will soon put you in a dreamlike state, but with a heightened awareness of your surroundings, so that you'll be able to see and communicate with our mystery man. This particular combination of drugs should allow you to cross _part-way_ over, to the in-between state where the man exists, and then bring him back with you. Just...go slowly when you try to cross."

The other times she'd crossed over on her own, she had never noticed it taking an appreciable amount of time; she was just in one universe one moment and the other the next. But Walter seemed sure it would work, and for all that she knew it could be dangerous to do so, she trusted him.

She trusted all of them, even Lincoln, who was so new to their little band of mad scientists. Fear that she would fail to save the man gnawed at her, but if she didn't believe in herself, at least she had three people who believed in her.

She closed her eyes and waited for the drugs to take hold.

Soon, the mist she recognized from her dreams began seeping into the dark view from behind her eyelids. She concentrated on crossing over, but tried to keep herself from appearing in the alternate Harvard's lab. Distantly, as though through water, she heard Lincoln say, "She's _shimmering_..."

"Olivia!"

The mystery man's voice came from behind her, and she spun to face him. He was standing very far away. "I'm here," she shouted, and started running toward him. This time he didn't recede with each step she took. From the way she could see him struggling to take a step, he didn't seem able to move toward her, but that was all right; she knew she could make it to him. The two universes were tugging at her, trying to drag her back in phase with the realities she knew, but she could withstand the forces for a few more minutes.

"Olivia." The relief and joy in his voice were palpable even from fifty yards away. She desperately wanted to know how the man could possibly know her well enough to be so happy she was here.

_You used to know him,_ she remembered the blue bird saying. Could it possibly be true? Had she ever known this man well enough that she would have been as ecstatic to see him as he obviously was to see her?

What passed for ground in this limbo state disappeared beneath her feet, and she stopped in front of him and reached for his left hand.

Her fingers passed right through him.

His expression mirrored the horror that bloomed ice-cold in her stomach. It was compunded when she saw him flicker several times, like a child's zoetrope or a dying fluorescent light.

"How do I get you out?" she asked. They didn't have much time. If she didn't get to him soon, it seemed very likely that he was going to disappear for good. Dammit! If she could just talk to Walter, he would probably know what to do...

"There are soft spots," the man said. "Like there are between the two universes. They're what I've been using to talk to you." He tried to touch her shoulder, but like her hand had done a moment ago, his simply passed right through her body. She couldn't even feel it. "I can't go through them, but I think you can."

"Where?" she asked, already running her hand up his arm. She still disappeared into him everywhere they touched.

"I don't know. They keep changing, and I can't..." He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists. "My right side, I think," he said. "But it won't be there for long."

She was already there, prodding at his insubstantial form, not sure exactly what she was looking for but hoping she'd know it when she felt it. The man was starting to flicker in and out of view again, and the pull of the universes she knew was getting harder to fight.

"Did you know I was trying to reach you?" he asked as she worked. "Every time I felt a soft spot, I looked for you or Walter."

"Was it you behind the talking animals?" she asked.

"Talking animals?" The man furrowed his brow.

There it was! As she probed her fingers over his wrist, she felt something insubstantial that still exerted pressure, like placing her hand in front of the breeze from a fan. Gritting her teeth, she forced her hand deeper into the soft spot, the resistance becoming greater and greater until finally, feeling like she'd stretched a rubber band until it snapped, she broke through to his dimension and touched the warm, solid skin of the man's wrist. She grabbed his hand as tightly as she could. Strong fingers curled over hers. "We have to go. Hold on to me!" She closed her eyes and let the universe she was born to pull her back.

She rematerialized in the chair, and he landed on top of her a fraction of a millisecond later, his knee driving into her stomach and his chin cracking against her forehead. He was certainly solid enough now. Practically before she had time to cry out at the pain, he toppled to the floor of the lab.

"Olivia!" she heard Astrid cry, and suddenly they were surrounded by her, Walter, and Lincoln. Disoriented from the trip and the crash landing, she let them help the man up from the ground, and waited patiently while Walter checked her vitals.

When he was done, she felt a hand close over hers. The mystery man, she realized, glancing up. He was looking back and forth between her and Walter and Astrid, a huge grin on his face. "You have no idea how good it is to be back," he said.

She stared at the others, who appeared as confused as she felt. Finally, she asked the question they all wanted the answer to.

"Who are you?"

* * *

><p><em>aaaaand roll credits! ;)<em>


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